We’ve got a couple of months of summer under our belts, which means the Baker tribe has had more than our fair share of days at the beach. Those warm, sandy, sun-soaked days at the beach, and days in the little beach town we visit in particular, remind me of Amity Island, that quaint little town almost done in by a hungry shark in 1975.Of course I’m talking about Jaws. It’s difficult to think of any film that screams “Summer!” to me more than Steven Spielberg’s first big hit. I’m sure I saw it when I was younger, but the first time I remember watching it was about thirteen years ago. Since then I’ve watched it three or four more times, and enjoyed it each time.Earlier this summer, during one of our first trips to the lake, I pretended to be a shark attacking my kids. We played, and splashed, and screamed, and then it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Jaws in a few years, and my three youngest kids might not even remember seeing it. So a viewing of Jaws became part of the must-do list for the summer.
Some of you might be thinking, “Hey, that’s not a kids movie. They shouldn’t be watching that.” And yes, Dear Reader, you’re right. It’s not a kids movie. But it’s rated PG, which is a lighter rating than the PG-13 Jurassic Park, which all of my kids saw two or three years ago and have absolutely loved ever since.Mrs. Doubtfire, Look Who’s Talking, and School of Rock are all rated PG-13 as well, and I bet you wouldn’t throw a fit about kids watching those movies.So pipe down.I know what my kids can handle. They’re eleven, ten and five, and, somewhat by design, we haven’t limited their viewing to reruns of Sesame Street and Leave it to Beaver. I was rather confident that all three kids—plus my oldest daughter, who first watched this movie with me when she was six—could handle it. The artistry, the thrill, the suspense of the film is more important than the slight unease they might have experienced.Of all the things in the film, my younger son was most appalled by the chief of police throwing a cigarette into the water while riding on a ferry boat. He could believe and understand killer sharks bigger than a boat, and limbs being ripped from attack victims, but the idea that people in the seventies didn’t care about littering was just too much for him!One scene in the film shows a man’s leg sinking to the bottom of the ocean after an attack, and I instinctively covered my five-year-old daughter’s eyes. She pushed my hand away, laughed, and said, “I already saw it, dad.”I forgot about the scene where Richard Dreyfuss’s character is inspecting the hull of a sinking boat, and a man’s corpse suddenly appears. We all jumped in our seats, and the image was off the screen before our brains could even process it. My daughter said, “That scared me!” and wanted to know why the shark ate the boat and not the man.And in the end, when the chief has his big moment with the shark (I won’t spoil it, just in case you’ve never seen it, but really, you need to see it ASAP), we all cheered and marveled at the impressiveness of the finale. After two hours of build-up, and John Williams’s haunting score, and wondering how the beast would be defeated, we’re treated to an outrageously pleasing conclusion.As we walked upstairs after the movie and my sons raved about it, but my daughter didn’t say anything, I wondered if maybe she was too scared to talk about it. When I tucked her in I asked if she was scared, and she laughed and said, “No.” She had no nightmares, and when I asked her about the movie today, she said she wanted to watch it a million more times.I’m glad they enjoyed the movie, and I hope, like their older sister, they’ll go back to it many times in years to come, and always remember the first time they saw it, in the basement, with me, near the end of a summer in which they spent a lot of time in the water.But unlike the beachgoers in the movie, who remained on the sand for fear of the shark, they’ll know they can go into the water, where the only shark is a dad who’s not as scary as he thinks he is.Let me send you more Dry it in the Water posts!
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